On Thu, 8 Aug 2019 17:00:22 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:
snip

Then you could read said volts with say an Arduino and then have a USB
interface to PC, effectively streaming the output of the strain gauge
in ASCII (numbers) to the PC (and the rest is software etc) .

Yup, or use a Arduino with Wifi and you can make it available on TCP/IP
or even a simple embedded web sever.

Sure, not what I want to do this time. ;-)

However, I understand the Arduino's only have a 10(12 with a tweak)
bit ADC and so with 10 bits I'm only going to get 1024 output values?

Sounds like it.

However, there are other options...

You could use an external ADC with more resolution and talk to it on the
I2C bus - trivial to do on an Arduino.

(don't, you sound like Rod!). ;-(

https://www.adafruit.com/product/1083

Cool. I have seen then at 24bit (FWIW etc) and have since seen the
mention of I2C, so that explains a lot. ;-)

Or I suppose you could use scaling and DC offsets (with some clipping to
protect the ADC) to feed a couple of ADC channels so you can read coarse
and fine readings and combine them in software.

Yeah, I think that's how it's done in some commercial 'Dual range'
scales.

eg, If that was a 1kg 'scale' then I could read around 1g increments
but if it was a 5kg scale then ~5g would be the smallest increment
(that may be fine but I am just testing my understanding here).

Or is the output of the little eBay strain gauge amps already serial
so if it was a 24 bit device (16777216)

That gets me a brake hose!

24 bits to decimal resolution. Try 352734178458 or 161780625450 ;-)

Cheers, T i m